Rudolf "Dolf" von Scheliha (31 May 1897 – 22 December 1942) was a German aristocrat, cavalry officer and diplomat who became a resistance fighter and anti-Nazi who was incorrectly linked to the Red Orchestra espionage group.

As an informant he passed documents to Soviet intelligence through his contacts Rudolf Herrnstadt and later Ilse Stöbe, when World War II started.

In the decades after the war, she worked tirelessly to rehabilitate her husbands reputation, eventually succeeding in the late 1990's with the help of Ulrich Sahm, who wrote a biography of von Scheliha that described him as a "daring and honourable resistance fighter".

[3] He began to work in the department responsible for East European affairs in the office of Undersecretary of State Adolf Georg von Maltzan in Berlin.

At the time he tried to solve several intractable problems in the relations between Germany and Poland that had reached a new low, by maintaining an open house where he invited members of the Polish elite to talk to embassy staff.

[16] In July 1933, a few months after Adolf Hitler's appointment as Reichskanzler, von Scheliha became a member of the Nazi Party, a requirement as a diplomat, resulting in him participating in the Nuremberg Rally.

[24] After the signing of the German–Polish non-aggression pact in January 1934, the embassy faced a continual stream of new guests whose visits were organised by Von Scheliha.

[24] Amongst these were Hermann Göring ostensibly coming to hunt but in reality to satisfy pre-invasion questions and the Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.

[25] A friend of his sister Renata, Momme Mommsen [de] also a philologist, described how "He wanted to appeal to the conscience of the nobility on the large estates".

In 1937, while his career progressed with a promotion to Councillor II Class,[9] during the summer, Herrnstadt used subterfuge to trick Von Scheliha into becoming an informant.

[a][31] When he returned to Warsaw, he informed Von Scheliha that had met a contact in England, who was an "intermediary" for the secret service who was interested in the political situation in Poland.

[33] In August, Herrnstadt met with von Scheliha to inform him that his "wife" Ilse Stöbe would be taking over his duties in Berlin, as he had to leave Poland.

[17] Three months later in January 1940, von Scheliha was promoted to director of the "Observation and Combating Polish Propaganda Provocations" ("Beobachtung und Bekämpfung der polnischen Hetzpropaganda") section of the Information department.

[37][38] In November 1939 after Sonderaktion Krakau, the arrest of 184 Polish academic staff, a war crime, von Scheliha protested to Reinhard Heydrich.

[39] As well as being critical of Kliest, when reports of the brutality of Hans Frank appeared in the foreign press, von Scheliha became his most implacable enemy[39] and began to resist.

[43] Von Scheliha secretly began making a collection of documents on the atrocities of the Gestapo in 1939, particularly on the murders of Jews in Poland, which also contained photographs of the newly established extermination camps.

In June 1941, he showed the dossier to a Polish intelligence agent, Countess Klementyna Mankowska, who was a member of the anti-Nazi group the Musketeers for which she worked as a courier.

[54][55] It describes the persecution of the church, the school and the university system; the dark role of the Institute of German Ostarbeiter as the driver of cultural rescheduling; the relocation and the sacking of libraries; the devastation of monuments; the looting of archives, museums and the private collections of the Polish nobility; the subversion of Polish theatre, music and press; and the forcible destruction of other cultural institutions by the Nazi Party.

[53][57] Kienlechner believes that Bninski then brought that material to Berlin to write the The Nazi Culture in Poland[53] for the Polish government-in-exile, who in turn published the document as a novel from 1944 to 1945.

[45] In February 1942, von Scheliha ended his attempts to name and send out exiled Poles as helpers for German propaganda to stop endangering them and himself.

[58] That spring, he travelled to Switzerland, where his sister lived[58] and provided Swiss diplomats with information on Aktion T4, including sermons by Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen on the murders of the mentally ill.[59] He also sent reports on the Final Solution, including the construction and the operation of more extermination camps, and on Hitler's order to exterminate European Jews.

[61] At the end of August 1941, Soviet intelligence sent GRU agent Anatoly Gurevich to Berlin to reestablish contact with Stöbe, but couldn't locate her.

[62][63] In May 1942, Bernhard Bästlein assisted Erna Eifler and Wilhelm Fellendorf who were Soviet agents who had parachuted into Germany in May 1942 with wireless telegraphy sets and been instructed to find Ilse Stöbe to re-establish communications.

[72] Ulrich Sahm believes that von Scheliha was arrested and tried, so as to remove a politically dangerous anti-nazi, who by 1942 was seen as an enemy of the Nazi state.

[68] In a written statement of 12 July 1952, judge and diplomat Herbert Schaffarczyk [de] stated that von Scheliha was tortured by the Gestapo to obtain a confession and believed that he wasn't allowed a defence lawyer during trial.

After the war, he informed the director of personnel at Foreign Office, Hans Schroeder (who wasn't allowed to attend), that he considered the sentence as effectively "judicial murder".

At best, von Scheliha should have been subject to an internal disciplinary hearing at the Foreign Office as they only thing they could prove was a dalliance with Ilse Stöbe.

In the process, the acts of interrogation and the Gestapo records continued to be uncritically classified as "sources" that were adopted by journalists and historians, to which former Nazi prosecutors such as Manfred Roeder[78] and Alexander Kraell [de], the former president of the Second Senate of the Reichskriegsgericht, contributed after 1945.

[83] The Foreign Office adopted this attitude[83] and for more than 50 years it refused to recognise Von Scheliha due to the findings of the 1942 Gestapo investigation.

[85] In 1956, Marie Louise von Scheliha petitioned the West German president Theodor Heuss who granted her a "revocable maintenance contribution amounting to the legal widow's daily needs".